I use Sancruzer flash drives for a very good reason. When I send or retrieve information to these usb flash drives a bright LED light flashes until my transfer is complete. When using other style flash drives it is very easy to remove the drive before the transfer has finished. To be honest, even when using the Sancruzer drives I very often make the mistake of improperly ejecting the flash drive. Removing the drive too soon results in the files being transferred becoming corrupted.
In the case of digital photos this is shown as incomplete pictures with gray panels in place of the image. The problem is compounded when you attempt to access the flash drive information again and Windows prompts you that the drive needs to be reformatted. Never do this, as reformatting your USB flash drive will delete all of the information on it. When you are prompted that the drive you know very well has been formatted properly needs to be formatted again your best course of action to recover photos from this corrupted flash drive is to access the file information by using a data recovery tool. The Remo software program for digital photo recovery is perfect to recover photos from corrupted flash drive storage. You can even use it to restore iphoto library files.